Business Intelligence Predictions for 2011Part 1 of 2

by Steve BogdonTuesday, January 25, 2011

What business intelligence trends do you predict for 2011?

The connected world of the internet has given rise to a new software development paradigm – built on open, web standards and expecting access to resources and services that weren’t previously or formally integrated. Geoffrey Moore projects this trend into the modern organization by simply stating "Tectonic shifts are occurring in today’s enterprise IT environment, which are giving rise to a network-centric stack of software". I absolutely agree. Based on these shifts, the 3rd generation of BI is born, built on new and open technology standards and vastly
new user and business requirements. Traditional BI platforms and technologies are poorly suited for this new world because of their complex and inflexible architectures. Enter a new breed of BI platform that is built specifically for this web-based world and you have the context and underpinning for a new class of truly pervasive BI that holds the promise of reaching the 85% of knowledge workers who have been forsaken by traditional BI tools and approaches. I see significant and continued advancement toward this vision during 2011.

What business intelligence trends do you predict for 2011?

2011 will mark a change in purchasing behaviour for the BI industry. Until recently, the decision of what BI tools to evaluate and purchase was largely owned by IT. Too often, this resulted in disenfranchised users and low BI adoption rates. To counter these issues organizations will shift to a best-of-breed approach, allowing departments greater autonomy in purchasing a BI tool that explicitly meets their needs. Business users will be more actively involved in the BI evaluation and selection process in 2011 which will subsequently fuel the growth of vendors that have a SaaS BI offering.

Secondly, BI vendors will see continued growth of turnkey applications built on robust platforms. While locked-down applications with restricted feature sets abound, the real winners will be vendors that offer a customization layer. ROI is realized right out of the box, while future extensions can be added to an application as needed. SaaS-based BI tools take this trend one step further by eliminating the maintenance and infrastructure burden associated with traditional on-site implementations. The industry will see growth from those vendors that are able to best understand specific user needs and possess deep domain knowledge in specific industries.

What business intelligence trends do you predict for 2011?

In 2011, businesses will demand more from BI. With intense competitive and economic pressures, it’s not enough to be interesting. BI must be actionable and enable people to respond smarter and faster to the opportunities and challenges of the day. Most companies rely on BI to help them understand what’s going on in their business. Many are ready to make the leap from “What’s going on?” to “What are we going to do about it?” Seamless integration from reporting to what-if analysis and scenario modeling helps businesses decide the right course of action. The integration of BI with SOA and BPEL will deliver the true payoff for BI by enabling companies to initiate business processes directly from their analysis, turning insight to action for more agile and competitive business.
Jacqueline CoolidgeOracle

What business intelligence trends do you predict for 2011?

Social Media. As it becomes ever more prominent, it is becoming more and more important for groups to pay attention to what is happening in the social media universe, and BI solutions can help organizations capitalize on this. Analysts such as Gartner have predicted a social future for business intelligence – i.e. businesses that leverage social media within their business intelligence software will gain an advantage over others. Business intelligence software developers should be taking note and making their analytics and reporting offerings more “social” by taking the technologies and principles behind Twitter, LinkedIn etc. and applying them to their solutions.

Small Business. Business intelligence is getting simpler and easier to setup as more and more vendors try to enter the market. This will enable smaller companies to take advantage of business intelligence.

End-User Driven Visualization. Large reports, even end-user driven ones, are pretty useless if they just present large amounts of data in text format or similar. Some feel that users should not have to take it upon themselves to learn the ins and outs of data visualization themselves when the tool itself could do it for you. Intelligent, intuitive tools that can understand the context of the data being presented and can choose one or a few of the most appropriate ways of displaying the information would be huge.